The Tsunami File
Authors: Michael E. Rose
Novels:
The Mazovia Legacy
The Burma Effect
Non-fiction:
For the Record
Plays:
Gallery Lotto Cantata Gameshow
Children's Literature:
Kangaroo Christmas
The
TSUNAMI
FILE
Not every victim is found to be innocent . . .
MICHAEL E. ROSE
McArthur & Company
Toronto
First edition published in Canada in 2008 by
McArthur & Company
322 King St. West, Suite 402
Toronto, Ontario M5V 1J2
Copyright © 2008 Michael E. Rose
The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rose, Michael E. (Michael Edward)
The tsunami file / Michael E. Rose.
ISBN 978-1-55278-705-2 (bound).
ISBN 978-1-55278-762-5 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8585.O729T88 2008 C813'.6 C2008-900301-2
Design: Mad Dog Design
Author Photo: Matt Dunham
The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council for our publishing activities. The publisher further wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
eISBN 978-1-77087-138-0
eBook Development by Wild Element
www.wildelement.ca
For Sheryle . . .
Journalist. Friend. Wife.
“I cried by reason of my affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me. Out of the belly of hell cried I and thou heardst my voice, for thou hadst cast me into the deep in the midst of the seas, and the floods compassed me about. All thy billows and thy waves passed over me⦔
- The Book of Jonah
“The importance of being able to fix human personality, of being able to give each human being an individuality differentiating him from all others, under conditions which will ensure that this individuality can be convincingly and quickly ascertained in spite of all efforts that may be made to confuse it, cannot be over-estimated
-Sir Edward R. Henry
Classification and Uses of Finger Prints, 1900
Phuket, Thailand â March 2005
F
rank Delaney on assignment in Thailand. Journalist on this occasion, not spy. Not yet.
What does he see? Squat steel shipping containers sitting in silent rows on stony level ground. They are old, weathered. Some are white, some pearl grey. Faded markings and logos and serial numbers from the sea-freight companies that once used them are still inscribed on the corrugated rectangular sides and the sturdy double doors, which are tightly closed against Phuket's intense tropical heat and light.
There are dozens of these containers in the deserted, barren compound. From afar, there is nothing that immediately indicates their contents. They sit silent in the new day's burgeoning heat, for Phuket in the month of March at sunrise is already hot. They reveal, for the moment, nothing.
Tall, slender palms sway in the slight breeze outside the compound's fenced perimeter. Inside, low temporary electrical poles among the container corridors support many strands of black cable. From these poles, single strands of cable pass to the backs of each container, then down to small air-conditioning units that hum quietly at ground level, the sound all but obscured by the rustle of palms and by the breeze itself.
Here and there on the rough gravel pathways are oldfashioned medical gurneys, little more than sturdy stretchers on oversized wheels. These give an observer the first hint of what goes on in this forlorn place, when the day begins.
There are several large tents to one side, khaki military tents with small flags haphazardly flown from makeshift standards. On one tent, first in the row, a flag of Sweden flutters fitfully. On another, Australia's flag, and on the rest flags of Germany, United Kingdom, Netherlands, other nations.
Through the slightly parted flap of one of these tents can be seen two sets of rubber boots, one set white, the other powder blue. On a cot in the dimness behind the boots lies a ball cap of the type worn by a policeman, perhaps a soldier. These items, too, give a hint of what goes on in this place when the day begins.
On the opposite side of the compound, well away from the tents, are some temporary flat-roofed structures with white metal walls and small windows. Air-conditioning units behind them are tethered to black electrical cables, as with the shipping containers. More medical gurneys are ranged near the entrance doors to these small buildings, alongside green rubbish containers on wheels with bright yellow plastic liners showing beneath their hinged covers.
A passenger jet takes off from the airport in the near distance, its muted roar breaking the dawn spell of this strange and lonely scene. Delaney turns to watch it go, squinting against the brilliant sun and the steel flash of aircraft wings.
Casually dressed people begin to arrive in the compound, individually, and in small groups, most of them incongruously cheery and talkative in such surroundings. They take little notice of Delaney standing outside the compound fence. He carries no notebook, no camera. The arrivals, however, carry small overstuffed backpacks, battered sports bags, official briefcases. They greet each other and remark on the weather and make small talk as colleagues do in any workplace on any workday morning anywhere in the world.
Many languages are used for these morning workplace greetings. Men and women, but mostly men, enter the tents and reappear in spotless medical garb. Blue surgeons' smocks and caps, white lab coats, rubber boots. Some have surgical masks bunched at the ready on their necks; some carry rubber gloves. Most of these people are Europeans. Some Thai workers in overalls and some uniformed Thai police also appear.
The place suddenly takes on an air of macabre hustle and bustle. Steel container doors are swung open. White vapours waft out, the cold dry air from inside meeting the hot moist air outside in a sudden ghostly mix. Within the dimness of the containers being opened appear rows of rough wooden bunks.
On the floors is a mixture of sawdust and sweating corrugations of ice.
On each bunk, in large blue or white plastic bags, lie the dead. Perhaps fifty bodies per 40-foot containerâfewer in the 20-foot variety. Dozens of these containers, row upon row, hold hundreds of bodies. These are the tsunami dead, those with no namesâbattered and drowned and rendered anonymous by the giant waves of December 24, 2004, which heaved chaos on Thailand and on the region for thousands of kilometres around.
Thai workers help European colleagues load some of the numbered body bags onto gurneys for the short journey to the low mortuary buildings. Inside, Delaney knows, with bodies laid out on stainless-steel pathology trays, flanked by gleaming instrument tables and trolleys and examination gear, experts in medical smocks will peer and prod and scrape and slice and sample and test and record all through the day; day after day, week after week, month after month. They are seeking history, certainty, identity.
Along with each body bag will come a plasticwrapped forensic file containing particulars of where each body was found and any obvious clues as to identity noted at the time of discovery, any clues as to who this human form might once have been.
It is the job of these pathologists and scientists and experts and police officers from around the globe to seek obscure signs in the bags of bones and flesh, to read signs from fingers and teeth and blood and marrow, and to discover, if they can, something certain about former identities, former lives.
At day's end, when the gruesome work stops once more and the last rigid finger or putrefying remnant of finger has yielded a print, when the last dental X-ray has been taken and the last tissue or bone sample has been labelled and carefully sealed away, when the last notes have been taken as to scars, tattoos and body piercings, as to watches, rings and pendants worn, the multinational teams will disperse as from any workplace the world over, making plans for meals, for drinks, for various evening excursions.
The bodies will be transported again to their places, for how much longer no one knows. Container doors will swing tightly shut once more. The interiors will fall silent and dark, the nameless forms on comfortless bunks abandoned to their fates once more.
These are the tsunami dead, rendered nameless by the catastrophic waves and the subsequent action of water and sunlight and insects on their skin and features and any other sign of who they were or one day might have been.
J
onah Smith was a fingerprint man. But he hardly knew himself in Thailand. He had been transformed. Friends and colleagues, especially no-nonsense former colleagues from Scotland Yard and his current colleagues at Interpol back in France, would surely have mistaken him for someone else.
He had, for example, bought himself a bicycle. Not new, not fancyâChinese-made, black in colour. It had cost him 800 Thai
baht
and a few minutes of heavy negotiation with a grinning local seller who had taken to cruising the Phuket area after the tsunami in a red pickup truck loaded with bikes of dubious origin and in various states of disrepair. Smith had not owned a bicycle for decades, not since he was a skinny boy in short pants in Yorkshire. But he now rode his jangling, creaking, disreputable machine each day from the Bay Hotel, where the Interpol team and some of the Thai disaster victim identification people and senior police had been billetted, to the Information Management Centre in Phuket Town. It was a cheery if somewhat sweaty and bumpy ride of about five kilometres. Smith had also exchanged his navy blue Interpol Incident Response Team golf shirtâall the Disaster Victim Identification teams in Phuket had been issued similar no-nonsense policelike shirts, emblazoned with their countries' flags or the logos of their home police departmentsâfor some wild floral shirts in bright yellows, green, orange. These local shirts were cooler and far more practical in the intense heat and humidity, and Smith liked the way the sleeves and collars flapped extravagantly in the breeze as he pedalled to work six days a week. He was transformed during those rides, for a time, from forensic expert and fingerprint man to all but carefree tourist.
His skin, too, had been changed by the Thai air and sun. It had had little exposure to the sun in the years he worked for the police. For 15 years he took the London Underground each workday from his dim ground-floor flat in Highbury; as often as not he had to run through rain the short distance from St. James's Park station to the forbidding glassfronted office building set back behind the famous revolving Scotland Yard sign. In London he might not see sunshine for days at a time. In Lyon he had been too busy in the depths of the Interpol headquarters to take much advantage of the southern France sunlight. Now, in Thailand, his skin was toasted brown, cleared of all blemishes, rejuvenated. His thinning curly hair had been bleached a slightly lighter brown, as were his eyebrows and his blossoming new mustache.
He was, in fact, healthier and happier than he ever remembered, despite being, as he sometimes had to remind himself, in the direct aftermath of one of the greatest natural disasters of all time, surrounded by death and destruction, by hundreds of unidentified bodies and by the frantic relatives of the dead, by police and forensic experts from around the world, by worried Thai officials and worried foreign diplomats, and trying, prying journalists.
The fact of the matter, he would often think as he rode his rickety bike to the IMC of a morning, was that for a fingerprint man the Phuket disaster site was a little bit of paradise.
He was 43 years old, at the peak of his professional expertise. He had been seconded by Scotland Yard to Interpol in France five years earlier. He had had a very good run at Interpol and in Lyon despite, or perhaps because of, his wife having refused to leave London and join him there. He had helped spearhead Interpol's effort to move more decisively onto the world stage for forensic identification, despite heavy competition from the ambitious DNA types inside Interpol and out, and he had been a natural choice, when the agency's Incident Response Team was hurriedly formed in the hours after the tsunami hit, to be sent out to Phuket to lend a hand.
Almost three months later he was still at it, still counting his blessings as each day another file of postmortem data hit his desk in the IMC building and each day he peered at fingerprints hour after hour, on paper and on computer screens, using his hard-won expertise to match patterns of arches, loops and whorls to the story of who the victim truly was.
It was work he had loved from the first day he walked into Scotland Yard's eighth-floor fingerprint division as a civilian trainee in 1984âduring the heyday, the height, of its power and prestige in the London Metropolitan Police. Sir Gerald Lambourne, the legendary division head, had retired a year earlier, but Jonah Smith nonetheless joined at a time when a good fingerprint man was still the object of unconditional respect in police circles and among the public at large. The mystique of a good fingerprint man's knowledge and skills were still the stuff of legend.
Smith had loved that world from the very first days and weeks of his lengthy training. He had loved walking amongst the dark wooden file cabinets that in those years held the millions of fingerprint cards compiled by Scotland Yard to date. He had loved learning the venerable Henry Classification System, despite its Victorian-era quirks and complexities, and he had loved peering for hours through a magnifying glass at fingerprints, sometimes hundreds in a session, trying to discover the true story of someone's identity or their crimes or their manner of death.
He had loved visiting crime scenes with police officers in those years, dusting furniture and window frames and mirrors and mundane household objects for finger marks. He loved extracting a usable mark from a challenging surface, loved bringing his findings back to the Yard and plunging into the drawers of cards, before all of these had eventually been committed to computer files, to find out just who was who and what was what.
“The time I like best is the moment immediately after you make an identification,” he would tell all who would listen in those years, would tell his wife in the years when she still listened to him enthuse about his work. “For a little while, for a very short while as you sit with the prints spread out on the table, you are the only person in the entire world who knows exactly who that person really is.”
Smith had immersed himself completely in the fingerprint world, in the worlds within worlds on the tips of everyone's fingers. No two prints alike, ever, anywhere, despite what the doubters of recent years and some ill-informed American defence lawyers had begun to say as they tried to cast doubt on the system, and despite what the arrogant young DNA types continually tried to make out as they jockeyed for position in the global forensic identification arena.
Smith had carefully fingerprinted himself as a young trainee and kept those prints on two dogeared evidence cards all these long years. He still studied them from time to time, watched closely for any slight changes in his own fingertips, much to the irritation of his wife. Fiona had always insisted that he was obsessed, and perhaps she was right. She had in any case refused to allow him to make a set of her fingerprints.
Smith regretted this. He would have liked to study her prints at length, alongside his own, for some outward manifestation of what it was that led to the disastrous marital mismatch he was only now beginning to accept. Sometimes, when he allowed himself to think about such things, he wished that fingerprints could tell him a little more than just someone's name.
Smith stopped asking Fiona to share any of his secret wishes and professional enthusiasms soon after their unborn baby girl died. Things had simply gone too silent between them for such non-essential requests, and now too many years had passed for him to begin asking her for much of anything at all.
He still very much enjoyed studying his own fingerprints, however. He examined the old set of evidence cards as a sort of relaxation or mediation when he was alone. He studied them for signs, patterns, clues as to who he was or might have been. Smith had, as well, developed the idiosyncrasy of staring at the patterns on the tips of his fingers when he was concentrating, or pondering a problem or speaking about a complex subject to a colleague or friend. His own fingerprints were classics of the composite varietyâin his view the most beautiful of all prints. His own fingerprints combined the most interesting features of the straightforward common arch pattern, with some frequent loops and the occasional flamboyant whorl.
Smith also always carried with him on overseas assignments a few of his favourite fingerprint texts.
They were no longer of any real use in his work. All was now computerized. The Automated Fingerprint Identification System had, it must be admitted, taken some of the mystery away from the classification work but it was still based, fundamentally based, on the system devised in Victorian times by the pioneersâGalton, Faulds and the great Sir Edward Henry. No matter where Smith went on assignment, no matter how far from home he found himself, he always carried with him, at a minimum, one of his several prized early editions of Henry's
Classification and Uses of Finger Prints
, Sir Francis Galton's classic text, and perhaps Faulds's
Dactylography
.
The Henry volume sat even now in pride of place on a shelf in Smith's living room at the Bay Hotel, alongside the Galton and the Faulds. Even if he did not consult Henry often, the book was always there as a silent testimony to the shining history of fingerprint science and of the service it had rendered to humanity in general and to Smith and his professional life in particular.
Smith empathized entirely with the Victorian suspicion of anonymity and of uncertainty. He would happily read and re-read the various textbooks and histories of fingerprinting, and he embraced, as the British had done in colonial outposts and in England itself, the need for a swift and sure method of identifying individuals as waves of international migration and domestic movement and social change intensified in what had too rapidly become a society of strangers.
But in the tropical society of strangersâliving and deadâthat was Phuket after the tsunami and the other affected countries throughout the region, and to which Smith and the other forensic experts had gravitated each for their own personal or professional reasons, there was, Smith thought as he pedalled his bike through the heat and humidity, not just tragedy but challenge, stimulation, inspiration, pleasure and, yes, sometimes even joy.
Jonah Smith was not normally a very gregarious man, but among the transformations he had undergone in Phuket, among the changes to his previous identity, was a newfound or possibly long-forgotten pleasure in the company of friends.
He liked now, for example, to meet his new Dutch friend, Stefan Zalm, at the Whale Bar in Phuket Town for ice cold Thai beers after both of their workdays had ended. He liked to compare notes on identifications made, technical troubles encountered, rumours heard, scandals and diplomatic machinations underway, and the various misdemeanours and misadventures of the police who had gathered in such large numbers in Phuket after the disaster.
Zalm was at his usual place at the end of the long dark bar on that March evening, sipping Singha beer from a small sweating bottle and looking every bit the earnest young Dutchman, the earnest young Dutch dentist, that he was. His skin was still like a boy's, his hair blond and wispy, though already receding noticeably at the sides despite his being only 35 years of age. Though finished work for the day, he still wore his white team shirt, with the flag of his country emblazoned on both shoulders.
Zalm waved to Smith and called out to the Thai barman. “Another Singha here, Prasan, please.
Thank you.”
The barman, impossibly slender, implausibly feminine, came immediately with the beer, placing it before Smith as he sat down, then putting his hands together and bowing his head slightly in the
wai
, Thailand's elegant sign of greeting and respect.
“
Khun
Jonah, welcome once again to the Whale Bar, welcome,” the barman said in the broad tonal drawl of Thais speaking English.
Smith raised the beer bottle in a toast. “My pleasure, Prasan. Cheers.”
Prasan glided back down the bar to serve a group of Belgian DVI officers already shouting and red-faced despite the pre-dinner hour. Zalm, too, raised his bottle in a toast.
“Our heroic efforts have ceased for another day,” Zalm said, taking a short sip of his beer. “You have made dozens of identifications today, Jonah, of course.”
“Of course,” Smith said.
“You will soon begin to tell me the entire history of the development of fingerprint technology by your Englishmen predecessors. I will grow bored by this. We will drink much more beer before I am able to stop you.”
“Maybe not tonight, Stefan. I'll spare you that ordeal tonight,” Smith said.
“Perhaps, for once, it will be my turn to tell you the entire history of the development of forensic dentistry?”
“The Case of the Matching Molars,” Smith said. “Coming to a cinema near you. Starring Dutch dentist and international film star Stefan Zalm?”
“Not yet, my friend. Not yet.”
“No IDs today?”
“Today one only,” Zalm said. “We are slowing down. One elderly woman from Italy. Very badly decomposed.”
“But not the teeth, of course. Intact as always.
Miraculous.”
“Exactly. Yes. Teeth intact. Always. Not like fingers. But the Italians have taken all this time to locate her dentist over there. Almost three months, if you can imagine. The dental X-rays were sitting in Milan all this time. A perfect match, it was obvious to me immediately. Two big fillings side by side right rear, she had, and some nice caps. Very nice work. Milan has good dentists.”